I’ll mirror what others have said. Arch is the most stable distro I’ve ever used over the long term. Even with heavy AUR use, I’ve been rocking the same installation for over a decade on one of my computers.

Big thing that people don’t understand about Arch is that AUR is not part of distribution itself and package recipes there will break and mainteiners will go missing and arch won’t care about them breaking.

Arch is extremely stable if you can read (this is not a joke). As in before doing system upgrade visit news and check if there is a need for manual steps during upgrade, you’llneed ro do something once or twice a year. And you actually need to read wiki and manual pages before doing things you aren’t sure about.

As for manual step-by-step install, you can do it with almost any distro. For example you can partition disk, mount everything and install core packages using dnf --installroot=... from fedora live, same idea with debian based distros.

What do you mean by poor long term stability? It’s a rolling release. I run the same installation for basically forever, while fixed releases’ life-time is measured in just a few years before you lose support and need to do a full distro upgrade… which rarely seems to work without problems.

PS: I just looked it up. The first date in my pacman log in from 2014…

I’ve heard it has poor long term stability.

Relatively speaking, sure. But I’d argue this is by design. Basically, every ‘modern’ distro is trying to solve the problem that come with updates on an ‘open’/‘free’ operating system. The solution they come up with essentially dictates a huge part of the identity of the distro. As I’ve noted elsewhere, these include the following:

• Some choose to outright freeze packages and only come with security updates
• Others have (almost) excessive testing to prevent breakage
• Yet others employ rollbacks to ensure that the (eventual/inevitable) breakage can easily be deflected
• Finally, there are distros that fall on a spectrum in regards to their more radical state management in hopes of minimizing breakage
• (Though, I’m sure I’ve forgotten some other methods…)
• And, of course, we find combinations of the above employed on the very same distro/system

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And, of course, we shouldn’t forget to mention Arch’s approach; lay the responsibility on the user 😅. So, Arch ‘breaking’/‘borking’ after an update is a user error. Which other distro can tout such an impressive entry in their documentation for system maintenance?

To be fair, this makes total sense. The user can basically build their system from scratch. So…, why wouldn’t they be capable to come up with their solution to the above problem? Besides, the ArchWiki continues to be a guiding light whatever solution they’d like to adopt: be it ‘freezing’ the kernel, or using better tested software, perhaps setting up Snapper for rollbacks etc…

Is there a distro that’s like Arch for installation but more stable?

Gentoo

EndeavorOS provides a GUI installer with what’s considered “sensible” add-ons included.
It’s where I am now. I started with Mint, played with Debian some, now “Arch”-ish.

It’s been good to me.